We’ve got a problem here in Edmonton. The Oilers are screwing up more than just one team with their clown-shoes operation. It’s bad enough that the Edmonton Oilers are broken, but the deep-seeded issues with drafting has left the club barren at the AHL level as well.
The American Hockey League is supposed to be a training ground for drafted players. The NHL team is going to get the very best young players relatively early in their development because of their talent, but the next level of professional hockey is for the rest. It’s for the 2nd rounders and later who aren’t ready to make the jump to the NHL at 20.
Now Edmonton has missed the playoffs in 10 of the last 11 years (soon to be 11 of the last 12) and building through the draft has been a priority. Taking away all of the 1st round picks, who were often in the top 5, that still leaves a lot of drafted players. How are they doing in Bakersfield?
Well, if you could find them you could ask them. Except they aren’t there. The Bakersfield Condors aren’t loaded with Oiler draftees who are pushing their way to the NHL. It’s even worse if we focus on forwards looking to make the next level. Here are all the Oiler Draftees who played for Bakersfield this year.
45GP Joey Laleggia 123rd Overall 2012 (25 yrs old)
40GP Caleb Jones 117th Overall 2015 (20 yrs old)
40GP Dillon Simpson 92nd Overall 2011 (25 yrs old)
29GP Ethan Bear 124th Overall 2015 (20 yrs old)
23GP Kyle Platzer 96th Overall 2013 (22 yrs old)
25GP Ben Betker 158th Overall 2013 (23 yrs old)
10GP Jesse Puljujarvi 4th Overall 2016 (19 yrs old)
7GP Ziyat Paigin 209th Overall 2015 (23 yrs old)
1GP Greg Chase 188th Overall 2013 (23 yrs old)
1GP Anton Slepyshev 88th Overall 2013 (23 yrs old)
That is the list of 10 Oiler drafted players who have suited up for Bakersfield this season. 10 of 36 players who suited up for them, even for just a single game. Of them 2 were Puljujarvi and Slepyshev who played extremely limited time there. One is Greg Chase, who was traded for future considerations. Another is Ziyat Paigin who was sent back to the KHL where he has accomplished nothing. This leaves 6 Oiler draftees still playing for the Condors.
Of those 6 remaining Oiler draftees still down on the farm, only 2 are playing as forwards and of them only 1 was actually drafted as a forward. Joey Laleggia was drafted as a defenseman but is actually playing in the AHL as a forward. He is 2nd in Condor scoring this year behind only Ty Rattie. Kyle Platzer spent the last while in the ECHL and has just been recalled to play in the AHL, so he isn’t close to prime time. Everyone else are defensemen.
I think we all have high hopes for Bear and Jones on the blueline. Jones is the better skater. Bear with the better offensive instincts. Jones is a lefty. Bear is the right hander. Ben Betker is slower than the continental drift and Dillon Simpson – at 25 – can barely be considered a prospect at this point. Everyone else in that lineup was a college free agent or professional.
You have to get 8 players deep into Bakersfield’s top scorers to find a player under the age of 25. EIGHT! And that player is rookie pro Dave Gust, who was signed after a 4-year career at Ohio State University. The Edmonton Oilers are not drafting and developing their own players.
So what the heck is going on there? Is Edmonton’s drafting that bad? Well, yes, it is. And it's especially bad at developing forwards. The Oilers draft process is a joke. However, you have to go back to the 2015 draft before you can find players eligible to play in the AHL. So let’s work backwards from there.
2015 – Oilers draft 1 forward: McDavid
2014 – Oilers draft 3 forwards: Draisaitl, Coughlin, Vesel
2013 – Oilers draft 8 forwards: Roy, Yakimov, Slepyshev, Houck, Platzer, Muir, Campbell, Chase
2012 – Oilers draft 5 forwards: Yakupov, Moroz, Khaira, Zharkov, McCarron
2011 – Oilers draft 3 forwards: RNH, Ewanyk, Rieder
That’s 5 drafts with 20 AHL eligible forwards. If we take away the 1st rounders (as they were expected to join the NHL as teenagers) that leaves 16 drafted forwards in 5 years. Of those 16, 3 graduated to the AHL then became NHL players (Rieder, Slepyshev, Khaira). Rieder, of course, was traded out of the Oilers organization before that in exchange for Kale Kessy. So in reality the Oilers only developed 2 of the 16 drafted forwards. Only 1 of the 16 still remains in the AHL under the Oiler development team, Platzer.
Two in sixteen. That is a 12.5% success rate in developing non-lottery selected forwards between 2011 and 2015. With 2015 being spent not taking a single forward after McDavid and 2014 having wasted picks on obviously poor bets like Coughlin and Vesel, the Oil set themselves up to have an AHL team with nothing feeding into the forward corps. In 2016 the only non-lottery forwards taken were the perennially injured Benson then Boston College teammates McPhee and Rasanen in the 5th and 6th rounds.
There’s not much on the way for help. Edmonton’s cupboards are bare and we’re seeing what that looks like on the farm now. It’s hard to see how a team that was building through the draft could have built so little after being at it for so long.
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